So this isn't anything like a regular review. See, Cowboys & Aliens (2011) was the very first Hollywood film I ever worked on, back in 2009, when I was an intern at Imagine Entertainment, and, like the parent of the moron who trips over every single hurdle at the track meet, I will beam with pride, even as it crosses the finish line in last place. With that said, I actually didn't think Cowboys & Aliens was so bad....
Perhaps most importantly, there seems to be the possibility -- just the faint possibility, mind you -- that the writers went ahead and used a suggestion I actually made in my fifteen pages of research and inserted a line of dialogue into the film at my behest!
Which brings me to the legal bit:
*The ideas expressed in Cowboys & Aliens belong to its credited screenwriters, and to those credited screenwriters alone. I in no way claim ownership of their work, nor do I mean to suggest any direct connection between the research I compiled and the thoughts expressed in the final film. It was seven dudes who worked on that script, and Lord knows any one of them could've independently come up with anything I might've put into my research, and subsequently made use of it in the final film.*
So wait -- what research?
Back in 2009, Cowboys & Aliens was still just a first draft, and I was an intern working at Imagine Entertainment, which is one of the many companies that helped produce the film. I was tasked with compiling research on the time and place in which the film takes place for Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci, two of the film's five credited screenwriters, who were busy writing a second draft at the time.
In my notes, I pointed out that the existence of aliens had been the subject of widespread speculation since the Middle Ages, and that the characters would probably be far more surprised by the presence of machines that fly through the air than extraterrestrials.
Lo and behold, the insertion of one line: Jake Lonergan is riding on the back of one of the aliens' flying machines. He brings it down, lands in a lake, pulls himself from the water and whispers incredulously: "We flew!"
Ok, so that's pretty circumstantial. Still, I'm excited. I'll never know if anybody actually read what I assembled, but at the very least it's cool to see that the writers were thinking the same thing I was.
So I warn you: perhaps my pride outweighs my good taste in this review. No, maybe not.
Cowboys & Aliens is pretty boring. That's certainly its greatest sin, but there are others: I found myself not caring about anyone. Jake Lonergan ("loner," get it?!?!) wakes up in the middle of the desert and he's sad because he can't seem to remember his wife and there's this picture in his -- sorry, don't care. Not automatically, anyway. I could've cared more, but only if there had been a single character who was really compelling (in all fairness, Harrison Ford's Colonel Dolarhyde came pretty close).
About all you need to know is that these flying machines of extraterrestrial origin are stealing people and Olivia Wilde is acting like she knows more than she should (in a patronizingly heavy-handed fashion) and the only thing that can save them all is Daniel Craig's rocket hands.
Maybe if they bothered to flesh out the supporting cast a little more without the use of spirit-crushing cliches (the weakling with masculinity issues is established as such when he gets his glasses thrown into the dirt by the town bully, etc, etc) I wouldn't just assume that any time a character felt something the writers were simply filling in the emotional blanks.
It's also missing a good portion of Act II. Or at least, that's what I figure, seeing as how bad the pacing of that section of the film is. Internal logic remains inconsistent (Lonergan controls his rocket hands with his thoughts -- except when he can't). Emotional problems are overcome without realistic effort. The aliens, which I imagine were supposed to be scary, were impressively animated but introduced and subsequently filmed all wrong. One of the characters dies, only to come back to life minutes later after being thrown into a fire (cuz, ya know, that makes sense).
Golden rule number one: unless you are explicitly going for a Christ metaphor, no character can ever come back to life. Not ever. What's left for the audience to fear if the characters can't die? And Cowboys & Aliens most definitely wasn't going for a Christ metaphor -- they were going for spoiler alert giving Olivia Wilde an excuse to walk around as naked as possible in a PG-13 film.
But it's just a movie. And didn't I say I didn't think this film was all that bad?
Well, the first act is well told and the action sequences are very slick (for the most part). There were a few limited surprises throughout the film, such as what the aliens are ultimately after, and I suppose I was able to sit there and eat Skittles for a full two hours while the "drama" unfolded. Ford's Colonel Dolarhyde went from primary antagonist to a fairly interesting anti-hero by the end of the film. The last twenty minutes were pretty exciting. And the special effects are great.
I mean, it's just a movie, for Pete's sake, so how angry can anybody really get?
I am a big fan of fun summer action flicks, not as they are, generally, but as an idea. Anything, and here I repeat, anything can make for a great story. A man goes to buy cat food. Somebody wants to create a homeland for the Jews. Aliens start abducting cowboys.
If anything can be made into a great story, why not go for an alien/cowboy mash-up? All you've gotta do is put real conflict in it, which address real concerns. Keep the plot progressing from one inevitable development to another, but be sure to surprise us along the way. And that's it. I don't think I left anything out.
Cowboys & Aliens succeeded in doing all of that for about a third of the time. So props to that, I guess. If I were a parent, Cowboys & Aliens would go on my A-for-effort shelf, and you'd be surprised that they even made 11th-place ribbons.
--Serge
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